Roach Map Tracks Your New York City Neighbors

November 8, 2010

What with all the bedbug fever, it’s somehow soothing to remember there are other equally gross critters running through New York City. The roach, the original most-hated-and-feared bug of New York, now has its very own map with which we humans can track its whereabouts.

A bunch of participants from The Great Urban Hack: NYC, a two-day hacker conference with the goal of enriching the city through tech projects, created Roachmap.com (see a version below), which will update weekly to show you where the roaches are hiding. Or, if you really want, you can sign up for weekly roach update emails!

The map tracks the location of roaches and color-codes their population by neighborhood using info from the New York City DataMine, which stores public data produced by city agencies.

We wrote a Python script that parses the data set’s WebExtract.txt file line-by-line, counting every single result for each ZIP code in New York in our window and every result specifically related to roaches. This script is called roach_parser.py.

While we don’t know exactly what that means, the map serves as a reminder that bugs are everywhere, no matter how rich or poor your neighborhood is, and that’s kind of nice to know– in the most repulsive way possible, of course.